I am an obsession
A candle made flesh
Fire builds to conflagration
Consuming
Consuming
Consuming
Until all flesh pulses
Desire waking
More
More
More
Never enough
Until all fuel is destroyed
And waking from the dream
Find myself alone
Bereft of her
Unable to see futures
Who would love destruction
Who would dare stand in fire
depression
Sands shift, reveal a garden
Share this:
Nightmares are Also Dreams part 8-Tara
It’s a thin fiction that I can’t hear the snap of the belt through the bathroom door but I know Pel needs that. He is trying to keep me safe and I appreciate the sentiment, but I’m better now. I was lost in subspace and had a bad flashback. I wish he’d stop acting like I’m about to break.
The hot water pounds against my shoulders, easing tensions I didn’t know I was carrying. Soaping up and sluicing off quickly, still I stand in the heat and spray. The air grows thick and hard to breathe. And almost, it feels easier to keep going and allow the wet and heat to drown me in the air. It’s not that I want to die or that I’m not happy. It’s that sometimes the pain of remembering is so heavy. I know that I need to get out and get going. But I just can’t.
The sounds in the shower change. The pressure in the room lightens and the air cools. I hear from the doorway, “Tara? Are you ok?”
Pel’s sweet voice fills me with shame and rage and just for a split second resentment.
I turn off the water jets, feeling a sullen bleakness settle down, and step out.
He’s waiting with a big towel. Arms stretched wide to envelope me. And shame overwrites the bleakness. Seeing him, trying to take care of me. I step into his arms and he rubs me down with the towel. Hands soft and firm. Businesslike and still I feel them linger over me. Never where you’d think. On my calves, down my side, along my spine. All dry.
The wet warmth vanishes and I stumble briefly, I’d leaned too far into him. But just as quick, warm robes encircle me. His arms pull me close. I feel his heart beat, that steady thump, for me. For me.
My body leaned back against his. His mouth against my ear. He whispers, “It’s time to get ready my Tara dove. Your clothes are laid out in the guest bedroom. Please get dressed in there.”
The guest bedroom? Why there?
Am I being punished…
Despair drifts back in, unbidden, as if through an open window
“Sara is taking up the whole bed, I’m afraid and we can’t have your dress getting dirty.”
I feel like I just slumped in relief…
Maybe he’s not completely wrong. It’s hard to admit. That I’m not just ok. It’s hard but I know…He does whatever he can to make me safe which is sometimes exhausting for me. But he’s not wrong either. I’m a grown ass woman and it’s hard to be taken care of like I’m not.
“Tara,” he asks quietly.
I shake out of a reverie that I guess dragged on and say, “Ok,” as brightly as I can. I brush past Pel and see Sara is splayed out on the bed. Wrists and ankles bound to the four corners. The bed top has been replaced by a white shiny leather one. A blindfold and ball-gag covers her eyes and mouth. I briefly feel something like lust and jealousy all rolled together. But I go to the guest room and find the outfit picked out for me.
Its peach! From the lace underwear and bra all the way to the two knives I’ll conceal on me, peach.
Where did he get blades that are peach colored?
Share this:
Getting ready for work in the too quiet
I retreat from the world into sleep every time I feel that liar in my head telling me that I’m not worth the relationships I have. That it’s no wonder that I’m alone. This litany of, I want to say lies, but I’m in it right now and I can’t say whether or not there is some truth to it. I mean I feel the weight of it. How could the people I lean on not feel that weight? And they have their own worries too. I hate adding to them. So I usually sleep and I feel better after doing so. But today I can’t do that. I have been up since midnight and I need to get ready for work. And I’ll probably be fine once I’m there and the armor goes up but it doesn’t go away and sometimes it breaks free. In these moments before I get ready, I think that I need a vacation but that’s just time alone in my head and that’s what I have now. Except, I’d get to sleep and yearn for even the limited connection that coworkers bring.
I guess most days I try to do a better job of being the man Morgan needed than I did when she was alive. If I was who I am now, she’d be by my side. And other days I think she was the only person who wanted me and look how I fucked that up. And I know it’s bullshit and that I did what I could but it doesn’t feel that way.
I think about how, if I’m this better person, why do my relationships never make it past that heady rush of the beginning months? Why do I feel the same and why do they not want me?
I feel like I’m flailing about just trying to move forward and I worry that I sometimes feel like an open wound. I hear my friends telling me that they want me around.
I don’t know what I’m trying to say. Just that I’m tired and want to sleep and I’m tired of finding people and losing people. Is the fault in the choice or the execution? I try to be less “I love you” now. Because I say it too soon?
Maybe they think it’s desperation or a projection of need? But my pain is knives turned inward. My perception and standards remain intact. I know how I feel. It’s just experience tells me that that doesn’t matter. No matter how much you love someone, they leave you. Better they know now, before it’s too late.
Share this:
Why I cry, sometimes for no evident reason
There is something in me that always wants more. More time with someone I like. More conversations, more touch, more laughter. More falling in love, hopefully together. And I think I understand why now.
As a child, I was alone. Surrounded by siblings old enough or young enough to be distant but still present. I would ride my bike for hours out in the heat. Alone. I would ride down alleyways discovering petty secrets. I would ride for miles down back streets in the quiet empty of the asphalt heat ocean. I would come back home and gulp down water and read some book meant for adults, having long since out read the local library of children’s offerings. The crackle of the polyurethane dust jacket and the silent turning of pages. Days and days left alone, because I didn’t seem to need attention, and others did.
I grew up filling this vast uncharted lonely expanse with temporary friends, ideas, and intense desire for a connection. But, I was both shy and quick witted, stung by others comments I would carve out their hearts with a sharp tongue and feel flushed with guilt and triumph. And I watched as others who seemed normal to me found connections and were seemingly happy. It looked so easy for them. Like breathing.
I turned to computers and twisted even further inward. My family emphasized practicality and money. I lost myself. And by the time I surfaced, I was successful and faceless. People knowing me was dangerous so no one did. Certainly not my family. And there was no one else. Until Morgan shattered my world. And everything changed. Like waking from a coma to find the world had moved on. Briefly, through, seemingly no action I took other than saying yes at the right moment, I was whole. She filled me in ways I’m still aching from.
Because well, you can read about Morgan on your own.
And I was so numb after, I just didn’t notice. But I started waking up almost four years ago. And that intense need for connection drives me. I fall in love. It’s not attachment. I’m not a baby bird. I just see people and they are beautiful. How can I not love them? I’m learning to suppress it but love always bursts out. Connection. More. An intense need to have them see themselves how I see them. To help them.
I don’t get people who don’t know if they have ever felt love. There are people who I would shift the world for, if I could.
But I think they see that empty vastness inside me. I understand how it’s too much. No one can fill it. No single person. But you wouldn’t be. I have friends, fellow poets and writers. Sometimes the vast empty swallows me and I seem like I’m way too much too soon. I’m sorry for that.
And a part of me says, “stay, just stay.” and another part whose all too familiar, knows that you’ll go, and another part would do much to be proven wrong and fill the vast empty with something other than echos.
Share this:
No sleep mambo
She consumes me
Heart on fire but no words
Say yes
Take you into my hands
Make you safe and unsafe
Dance hands across skin
Across throat
Air dwindles as euphoria spreads
I know she doesn’t want me
Her heart a danger
Can’t help how I feel
She doesn’t want to know
Again and again on this circus wheel
Making the same mistake
Only one ever wanted me
And I failed her
I don’t deserve anyone else
Share this:
Nothing stops
The fecund stink of fresh turndown earth
Sweet summer grass spouts green stalks
The soft bud peaks in the still gray of dawn
Fresh air and the slice of cold wind
Lost amidst the summer waves
Soft wind
Warmth of day grows
Heat builds
Secrets whisper
Bones ache with tired
Brain fills with lies that sound like truth
Sleep the only refuge from hopes blade
But still
The heat envelopes
The night closes in
Stars breathe life to darkness
And the moon
Rises
Share this:
Slim to none
Walking down the dark hallway
The door of the bedroom the only light
I can feel the ozone and taste the wet
It’s rained outside and I missed it
Sitting awake in my bedroom at 4am
Binge watching TV on Netflix and playing games on my phone
Looking at Facebook messenger to see who might be up
Wondering if they just left the phone on
Or are they like me
Tired but not wanting to sleep
Because we lose so much time to sleep
Because lately we’re so tired
Depression in other words
I sleep instead of think
Because that first thought
Of no one wants me
That I’m so loved but also unwanted
Just leads to spiral and sleep is better
Than falling down that rabbit hole
It’s 4am and I wonder at what my life is
Every bit as lost as I ever was
Just now I know why and supposedly that’s better but
Doesn’t feel like it
I’m no icarus to fly so close to the sun
But then I have a penchant for falling
Maybe I’m just so used to the fall that I love the sharp stop
Or maybe I’ve never stopped falling and all of this
is a dream
Or a hell
Share this:
Weighted value judgment
Sounds spill out
No words make sense
Jumbled sounds said with a smile
The laugh
The grin
Comrades in arms
Disappear at the end of the day
Long silences filled with memes
With fake people and their fake problems
Mirror reflecting stoic
While a heart aches
That basic human touch
Long departed
Unshed tears war with skipped heartbeats
Sitting in the restaurant that I can’t afford
Anything to stop from hearing
The ticking of the air conditioning
In these too silent spaces
Without you
Share this:
It was simpler then
I called this clarity
I called it sanity
It’s a barren empty
A field of endless days
Longing for more
Am I longing to feel
….
Anything
Is this my addiction
To pain
To joy
Or is this what I felt
Without the hope
Of a tomorrow
And now I’m self aware enough
To realize it
Some days other people are an agony
Fidget to get free
But even that’s better than sitting alone
There’s no freedom
My choices have led me here
To this barren earth
This windswept empty
Bereft of everything
Even fear
What’s left when even fear is gone
Joy is a thing of blood and bone
My heart is full of dust and memories
What fool would want a piece of pain
Drink my tears and end with sand
On this shattered plain
Beneath this bowl of sky
Pelgris 